ACADEMIA

Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today announced that its TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers and S-Series family of access switches power five of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world and 24 of the fastest 100, as listed by Top500.org. By combining reliability, network control and scalability, Force10 delivers the performance characteristics upon which the world’s fastest supercomputers rely. “Force10 has well established roots in the research and education communities that have enabled our relationship with the most innovative supercomputer operators to evolve as performance speeds continue ever higher,” said Sachi Sambandan, vice president of engineering at Force10 Networks. “The Force10 TeraScale E-Series is uniquely designed to deliver reliability without compromising system throughput, a performance characteristic that is essential when a supercomputer needs to process more than 100 Teraflops per second.” Supporting 1,260 Gigabit and 224 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series provides the high performance connectivity that Oak Ridge National Laboratory depends on in its Jaguar supercomputer, the second fastest in the world. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series also plays an important role in two newly ranked IBM BlueGene deployments at the New York Center for Computational Science at Stony Brook University / Brookhaven National Lab (ranked 5) and the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Renssalear Polytechnic Institute (ranked 7). These two supercomputers are also the fastest in an academic setting. The newest Dell cluster computer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ranked 8) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, home of the most powerful supercomputer in Europe (ranked 9), also depend on the reliability and scalability of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s system has been in the top 10 since it first debuted two years ago. Leveraging the performance scalability of the TeraScale E-Series, the center has been able to seamlessly increase the processing capacity of its supercomputer to keep pace with new supercomputers on the list. The Top500.org list ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers twice a year. In the most current iteration of the list, which was released at the end of June, the system ranked at 500 would have been ranked 216 only six months ago, the largest turnover rate in the history of the list.